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Does anybody have one of these? I have one, who over the past couple of years (after knowing him for nearly 5), it has come out that most of the stories that he has told me (and our other friends) have been absolute bollocks.

It’s now got to the point where we can’t believe anything he has told us, that one of us has not seen with our own eyes, which is an absolute shame because most of his stories have been so good that I wish that they could be true.

For example, he once told us a story about a fight at his school in Wigan between one of the hardest lads in the year and one of the nerdy boys. It apparently spilled over into a local co-op, where the nerdy boy dropped his trousers, shat in his hand, and slapped the bigger lad, thus winning the fight.

How could anybody not want that to be true?

So, do any of you guys have friends that chronically tell porkies? What are their best ones?

Don't know why, whether he half believes them or wants to impress us - he's a lovely guy, so we don't really call him up on it, but it's all bollocks.

He once told us that his older sister was going out with David Tennant, because she's been working down at the BBC in Cardiff when he was filming Doctor Who. He said that on Saturday night's after it was on he'd phone the house and Rob would tell him what he thought of it. Then we started reading stories about how he was engaged to someone else, so we raised it with Rob - he said his sister had just found out, and was devastated. Later, when it came up again, he said his sister had been lying all along, and was now being sectioned because was ill. So what about the phonecalls Rob? (We didn't ask him that, just looked at each other uncomfortably).

He had others - he was constantly going to Reading festival as a roadie for some up and coming band (who we could never find on the posters) but it kept falling through.

After uni it got better and I haven't noticed anything recently, it was still weird though.

about serious stuff as well, like getting raped, her boyfriend buying her stuff all the time (turns out it was all shoplifted). i didnt even know what fingering was until one day in gcse french she was describing how she was sexually assaulted in great detail. it was really weird, and people were working out how all her stories were bullshit but she would carry on, each french lesson with a new story. also she would shoplift stuff from the body shop and hand them out in class, saying her (imaginary) boyfriend gave them to her

mine's always talking about girl's he's been with, and what makes it worse is another mate of mine, the dopey one, always believes him. When I try and shoot him down, or my other mate with a stupid gel frigne, I get called a briefcase wanker

Eventually I just called him up on it and said 'But did that actually happen or is this just another tall tale?'

He told us all he was from a really rough neighbourhood and that if we went to his place in skinny jeans, we'd probably get battered in the street. We got there and it was this picturesque Cheshire village. He

but in that small circle of friends there's 4 of us who are very close and we all know he embellishes quite a bit, but most of it's harmless so we don't bother. ie music success before he met us and more recently some DJing taking off in America etc.

His friend wasn't allowed planning permission to demolish his house, so they built a new house around the old house and threw the old house through the windows.

Also his mate...fucked a cow.

Once when I asked him if he knew ehere my dad was he replied with..."In his BODY..duh"

Great lad - We tricked him in the end by making up names of nightclubs in London and asking what he thought of them. Turns out he'd been to several of them including Covent Garden's infamous Shittt Club.

When he came round, we would always play games on my Sega Megadrive. I remember once that he swore blind that if you swapped all the wires around and put them into different sockets, and then put “Sonic and Knuckles” (which had a sort of docking by so that Knuckles could be used in Sonic 2) in the machine, with any other game loaded on top, then you could play as Knuckles in that game or as the character from the game on the Sonic levels.

I didn’t believe him, and then had to spend an awkward 45 minutes as he kept setting my machine up over and over again to try and prove to me it worked.

'The thing with all this investment banking and hedge fund managing is that anyone can do it. Last month while you were all away I was at it for two weeks before they found out. Just went to the interview, said I could do it and they gave me the job. Easiest thing I've ever done.'

I for one believe him. There must be loads of invesment banks in rural Worcestershire just desperate to hire inexperienced youths with patchy qualifications and job histories.

because a girl in my sister's class claimed that her dad kept big cats in the garden which they bred for food.

That girl's cousin was in my class. She claimed to have leukaemia when she was at primary school, and (less seriously) claimed that Peugeot was pronounced 'Pew-gott' if you bought a special one from Europe.

Another friend of my sister's claimed (with some - possibly fabricated - evidence) to be in a relationship with David Blaine when she was 16 (about 10 years ago).

Really stupid tall tales, got a bit pathetic by the time we were in year 6, but still, it was primary school so not too weird. We went to separate secondary schools and I hardly ever saw her after that, but one day I bumped into her when we were 17. I assumed she would have grown up, but no, she'd got worse. She tried to convince me she was engaged to Morrissey. Seriously. She wasn't doing it for a joke, I think she almost believed it herself. She was even wearing an engagement ring. She said she was moving out to LA to be with him.

One of the people I was in halls with used to come out with such shite. She was positive that she saw Kanye West play at Oceania in Kingston despite everyone else there (including the promoters and a lot of people with the good sense to take pictures) insisting it was actually Sisqo. She also invented a load of really odd holidays that reckoned she went on, including a month spent in Turkey. Apparently on one day they got bored and took a helicopter day trip to Mongolia.

The other guy is kind of a moron who I've relegated to friend of a friend as a result of his lies. Every year he'll announce he won some money betting on the Grand National, but when challenged he can't remember the name of the horse or the odds, just that he won eighty quid. He also claimed he'd been windsurfing last summer. When asked how many times he instantly replied "thirty" and walked off.

from junior high/high school was a chronic fibber. She eventually grew out of it (for the most part) but when we first met at age 12, she had some real gems.

For whatever reason, she wanted to convince everyone that she had moved to Tennessee from Oklahoma. She claimed that her neighbors in Oklahoma were Hanson (if memory serves me correctly, they are Oklahoma natives). One day, we were experiencing really bad weather and the county was under a tornado watch. We were in the library when all of a sudden, this girl starts freaking out and assumes the fetal position. She's screaming, "I can't live through another tornado like the one that destroyed my house in Oklahoma!"

Looking back, she was probably exhibiting signs of mental illness. The girl had lived in Tennessee her entire life.

by claiming that in the event that anyone pulled out in front of him, he would assume a torpedo pose and dive forward through one side window and out the other, emerging unscathed. He was completely serious and claimed that this technique was taught during riding lessons.

the entire time i knew her she made up these crazy stories about her teenage drug addiction, being held down by her cousins and forced to shoot up heroin and the like. her estranged father was a supposed drug lord. She went out with one of my friends, on and off for three years and during the last time she claimed she had an ectopic pregnancy to him. I actually didn't find this out until a year or so after the fact, and seeing as I saw her out and about during that time, I seriously doubt that she was ever with child.

She also did just make up loads of little things, in weird attempts to make me jealous (i think) like saying she owned something she didn't, or such and such a boy hit on her. It was always very obvious. I put it all down to her having huge trust issues. She also had a terrible attitude in all aspects of her life and it made people dislike her, and that made her very insecure. By the end I just had enough, don't these people realise there's nothing to gain by telling constant lies?

who claimed that he was on an empty metro in the morning and a 'massively hot' girl got on at Wallsend and 'just started totally getting off with [him]' then got off at the next stop. I suppose that sort of thing does happen like once in a blue moon but he kept moving his eyes around and it took so long for each detail to come out of his mouth you could almost see the cogs turning in his head. It was amazing. And by your mid 20s you should probably have given up lying like that. Or at least be able to lie at a reasonable speed and have your lies planned out in advance.

it's the craziest bit. Like once I was sitting at the front of the metro and we stopped in between stations and there were two guys just beating the shit out of each other on the line in front of us. There was so much blood it was like a film or something.

of two women getting on the Tube late at night and totally lezzing out in front of the one or two strangers that were on the train at that time. So yes, that sort of thing does indeed happen from time to time, even if this particular instance is a complete fabrication.

so, for example, he'd phone and invite you out and tell you he'd spoken to the rest of our group of friends and they were all coming too and, by doing this to everyone, it would get most people to come out.

I stayed friends with him for a bit after we finished but, after Uni, he got a job for a telesales company that basically conned businesses by selling advertising space in international magazines that didn't really exist (they'd print enough copies to send to the companies who'd paid for the space as proof but there was no wider clientele it was going out who to) .

Not long after he stated doing that I heard him on the phone to a friend of mine who he was supposed to be meeting that night and had blown off and was so convincing in pretending he'd forgotten, I suddenly had this cold moment of realisation that he was so plausible in deceit, and lying came so quickly and naturally to him, that you couldn't actually trust or believe a single thing he did. Not long after that I cut off all contact with him and, by extension as he was the organiser of our group of friends at school, the rest of the group too.

Depressingly the company was a massive success, he rose through the ranks, they ultimately diversified and went legit and he now owns at least three large houses around the world and has the life of an international jetsetter. Lying seriously pays if you know how to not get caught.

that she’d heard on Live at the Apollo and pretend they’d happened to her. It used to really piss me off so sometimes I’d finish them for her. I think she hates me now.

Another girl lied about having a cancer scare and having to go to the hospital and have loads of tests done. Then my friend’s mum saw her mum in the street and started talking about how awful it must have been and the mum just looked bemused. The worst thing was that she’d only said it because she thought she’d done badly in her exams and wanted an excuse.

Then there were just strange kids who’d make up stuff about being pregnant, or born in world war two, or too poor to afford anything but mars bars.

for work experience in year 10. Apparently the doctors were so impressed with her psychology skills that they sent her to speak to a psychopath who pulled a knife on her and told her he would hunt down her family.

Weirdly people seemed to believe the story, despite its blatant ludicrousness and the fact that the only psychiatric hospital in the area had closed 22 years ago. I'm not sure what she actually did for work experience, there is a tiny hospital in the same town so perhaps she went there, met a few people with depression and felt the need to embellish. Although it's so difficult to get work experience anywhere with strict confidentiality policies anyway that I doubt she even did that. She probably just went to a shop.

who led myself and others to believe he had been in a relationship for 5 years. He then said a few weeks later that the aforementioned relationship had now ended and was upset about it but persevering.
At one point I got a text from him saying "you can't just come back into my life (insert 'girlfriend's' name here)" then I received another text minutes later saying "oh sorry, that wasn't supposed to go to you". That in itself seemed suspicious to me, how easy is it to reply to someone's text but send it to the wrong person?
If I asked him how he was doing after the break up, sometimes he'd get really wound up/upset and cry.
Another time we were on our way out and his phone rang, he chatted for ten-odd minutes and then when he got off the phone said it was his ex.

Some months later in the middle of the night he posted a status admitting he'd made up his relationship, had never had a girlfriend and that if he didn't admit it now, he wouldn't be able to sleep.

He's still my friend and we've never discussed it but sometimes I think....it's one thing to lie, but to lie so elaborately - sending people faux texts, staging faux phone calls, staging faux emotions! It's too much.

a friend who's been there for about 3 years, and from about sept 2010 till just before xmas i spent loads of time with him. he would often mention that his flatmate was attractive and sometimes they would sleep together. loads of people from work had been to his house after nights out to drink some more. both bedroom doors were always locked. not exactly abnormal. he said that he was a writer, often mentioned that characters he'd created were based on person x y or z from work. he was dating a girl from work who returned to south africa in sept 2011 after finishing her degree, and so they wrote to each other constantly cos she was intending on coming back after 6 months. anyway, in november 2011 one of his gf letters got found by his flatmate. she was really angry and contacted gf to find out what was going on. it turned out that the flatmate wasn't his flatmate. she was HIS WIFE. they got married in may 2011, about 6 months after he'd started dating the girl from work. and him and his wife had two kids, both toddlers. so the two locked doors in his flat were locked because one was the room for the kids and the other was the room for him and his wife. he's not a writer at all, but his wife works in publishing. he'd spent 2 1/2 years lying to absolutely everyone. you'd think that the scandal would have made him leave the job but he hasn't. lots of people still hang out with him and talk to him. they say 'oh you have no right to judge what he did, you don't what may have happened in his life that's made him this way' ... imo there's no excuse for spending 2 1/2 years lying to absolutely everyone in your life. me and a couple of others who were pretty close to him don't talk to him, i don't even acknowledge him if we walk past each other in the corridor. the thing that freaked me out the most was that he hadn't told his parents that they had grandchildren. that is seriously messed up.

he only had friends round when his wife and kids were out of the house, and locked the doors to the bedrooms to make sure no one saw the double bed/what was obviously a kids' room. You have such a dark mind.

He's a bit of a raconteur, and I think he does it to make himself appear more interesting, but he always goes over the top with the whacky details and just manages to embarrass everyone.

Kind of a shame, and completely inexplicable because he's a successful guy - talented artist, good looking, got a lovely partner & kid - just has this tragic need to big himself up. It's like he's 10 years old.

There was this massive guy who must have been 19/20 who used to come hang out with us. Think his name was Carl. He was a friend of someone who was friends with one of my mate's brothers, possibly. We thought it was a bit weird, but we let him come hang out because he was quite a generous guy, used to bring us beers and stuff.

Told some proper textbook tall stories though. Just off the top of my head, here's some of the shit he came out with :

- Said that he'd once taken some ridiculous arbitrary number of E's (16 possibly?) on a night out and it hadn't affected him. This was despite our knowledge of him regularly puking after a few Stella stubbies at house parties.

- Once we were having a conversation about rugby and he pipes up that he played sevens rugby for England under 18s. Vaguely plausible as the guy was a tank, despite his penchant for trench coats and spiked dog collars. Some time soon after though he came to meet us down the park and we were throwing a rugby ball about. We made him join in and he had no idea how to pass the ball. His excuse was that he was a forward and wasn't in the team for his passing. Not in sevens rugby mate!

- At a party he bragged that he had once beaten Brazil with Iran on FIFA '99 on World Class setting 35-0 in a 4 minute game. One time he was round my mates house we made him play the game. Both me and my mate beat him convincingly. His excuse was that he had a custom made controller pad on his N64 that was specially adapted for his hands. Iraq weren't even on the game.

- He showed up once at my mate Steve's house and we were wathing the film Dangerous Minds starring Michelle Pfeiffer and including the song Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio. Telling us that he had once shared a spliff with Coolio in a club in Brixton. Possible, just. We struggled to keep a straight face when he started telling us about the time he shagged Michelle Pfeiffer though.

- We didn't see him for about 6 months once, and we were like ... hey, where you been Carl? ... and he told us he had just spent 6 months in Kosovo as a special forces marine. He told us that if we told anyone about this though, our lives would be in danger.

There must be so many more. In addition to this, he treated us like HEH, HEH STOOPID KIDZ all the time and tried to tell us about how stuff worked and what stuff meant even though we had a relative expert in every academic field in our friend group. He lost so many arguments where he was just forced to back down because he was proved to be completely wrong.

Bit sad really, but quite funny looking back on it. Wonder what he's up to these days.

“At last year’s Christmas party, the Sales Director told me that he had been on a stag weekend to Croatia, and during the trip they had gone out hunting with semi-automatic weapons… in the snow… in sub-zero temperatures. He then informed me that he had taken a shot at something he saw moving in the trees… and it turned out to be a human being.

He said he was then rushed into a blacked-out SUV and taken back to the 5-star hotel where they were staying and told by authorities never to mention it again.

An hour later at said Christmas party, he proceeded to get his cock out and ask a fellow male member of sales to 'cup it… or at the very least cup my balls…'"

Never saw any evidence of any of this, and she didn't exactly have the 'look' for it, though she was okay-ish at singing.
Once she spoke to 'Wyclef' on the phone, but didn't let me talk to him.
I never gave her any indication I am an admirer of the life and works of Mr. Wyclef Jean, quite the opposite most of the time.

who claimed that he was late for his shift because he's been 'watching his mum die'. He missed a shift a couple of weeks later and the boss called his house. His mum answered. The boss actually told her what he'd said. I thought that was pretty horrific.

I've managed to cut all of these crazy people out of my life. I'm a bit of a crazy magnet and always have been. I think i used to think i could fix everyone, so id take them under my wing for a bit.

Ive stopped that now. It was only causing more stress for me.

In primary school, i had a mate Joanne who told me loads of BS stories. One was that she had triplets and they all died (we were in primary school!!) and another is that her brother had an accident and was in a wheelchair, this i totally beleived.. until i was invited to her house for a sleepover or for dinner one day.

I seen her brother come running out of the house and jumped into their car. I said to her, i thought your brother was in a wheelchair? she blatently just lied in my face again and said.. it's amazing, he just got up and walked!!''

hmm.

Sometimes i love a good spoof story. We have a saying here in Belfast, Aye, yer ma's your da'' which doesnt really mean anything other than a bit of 'slegging'(shabs & bants), that goes on.
A guy proclaimed at a party one night that he and his mates made up this saying all by themselves. Swore down that it was them.

This was impossible. The same guy came up with some clinkers! none of which any of you would fully understand as its all a bit 'N-iron' politics.

there was this right bellend who was with us, who was a singer but really shit at singing.

we decided to tell tell him a few lies to see what he'd believe

someone said they'd been on junior masterchef
someone said their sister was a pornstar

etc. etc.

now at that time EVERYONE called me wiggy, even the conductor of the band. so anyway, said bellend asked me 'wiggy, what's your real name... is it... stuart?'

so of course i said yes it was

then the next day, we were all signing something to be displayed at the college and while i was doing it the conductor came over and said loudly 'er wiggy, are you gonna sign it with wiggy or with stuart?'

whose life when I met him was extraordinarily complicated and tragic. He'd had this girlfriend who'd died in a car accident and left all her money to him in her will. The amount of money was huge, as she'd inherited shitloads when her parents died, but her sister (only surviving relative) contested the will, and so Paul was drawn into a nasty & protracted court battle.

During this time, he'd become so depressed that he'd deliberately driven his car off the road and tried to kill himself. The car was a write-off and he'd spent a couple of months in hospital. Eventually he won the court case and got the money, but on his doctor's advice he put the money into some sort of trust where he couldn't access it for five years until his mental health situation stabilised.

BUT. The trust was overseen by three trustees, and there was a condition in the trust terms that if anything irregular happened with the trustees, the money would automatically be transferred into Paul's bank account (this was to guard against his being ripped off by the trustees).

So what happened next was that one of the trustees died - and coincidentally, this happened at around the same time that some piece of routine paper had to be signed. When it became apparent that there were only two trustees' signatures on the paper instead of the expected three, *whoosh* all the money in the trust was magicked into Paul's bank account.

Lucky Paul, you think... but no. Turns out the bank had been authorised by the police to red-flag them if any large sums of money were unexpectedly moved around, and so when Paul's savings account suddenly went from 20 quid to over a million, the bank reported him.

Next thing you know, Paul's banged up in Scotland Tard being interrogated about the money, because he has the same name as a notorious IRA member.

And on & on it went, there were more developments but I can't remember them. At some point, his friends came to realise that this baroque tale was nothing more than a tissue of bullshit, but nobody ever called him on it. We all just felt sorry for him.

Everything was so tightly researched and thought-out, plus he was just one of those talented actors, took me ages to suspect it was all bollocks. I think that in some way he almost believed it all himself, or at least immersed himself in the fantasy so deeply that he completely inhabited the character he'd created for himself. He used to crash on our couch, I ended up just feeling really uncomfortable around him.

she said her boyfriend had died in a car accident, had the top of his head chopped off, she was in the car with him when he died. His last words were 'look after my stuff'. Then his head fell off or something.

He had a home-taped cassette of Led Zep IV, and showed it to me. I was all like "Oh yeah, Led Zep IV, this one's great, I've got it at home" which was a big fat lie.

The other kid asked me which was my favourite song. Cool under pressure, I looked at the handwritten track listing on the cassette card and saw he'd written The Battle of Everm. So I said "Oh yeah, The Battle of Everm, that one's the best for sure".

Then he revealed that it was called The Battle of EverMORE and he'd just run out of room to write it on the card, snatched the tape back off me & smacked me across the back of the head with it.

No coming back from that one. Every time he saw me from then on, he'd bust out singing "Ohhhh.... the Battle of Everrrrrm" in a gravelly country & western voice.

When I was about 18 or 19 our regular pub in my home town of Aylesbury was frequented by a similar sort of character called Richard. Richard was in the pub every night, normally on his own, and like us he was friends with the landlord so he eventually got talking to our little group. He was about twice our age, maybe late 39's early 40's, and always seemed to have a fair bit of money - he'd often buy you beers, and occasionally would take you out elsewhere and insist on paying for all your drinks. He seems a fairly regular bloke, generous with lots of good stories, but otherwise unremarkable. However over time he started to hint about a secret second life he had - at first it was fairly innocuous stuff, such as saying he had to leave the pub early because of some mysterious task he had to complete that he was unable to talk about, but over time things escalated and it soon became clear that he was alluding to being some sort of government secret ops agent / assassin! He'd mention the terrible things he had had to do for the good of his country (but that he was unable to talk about) and often asked us things like "would you be able to kill a man if it was to save others?". None of us believed him for one second but still he persisted, ramping it up ever so slightly each time.

One day we came in and found him talking to another bloke, who introduced himself as one of Richard's workmates. Unable to resist, we asked this guy what they both did for a living and he replying that he worked with Richard in a factory, making some sort of industrial kettles. Once his mate had left Richard gave us a little knowing wink and told us that working in a factory making big kettles would be the ultimate cover story, say for example for someone like a hitman who had to operate outside the law.

Things came to a head one day when he took a big leather briefcase into the pub and very slowly and deliberately placed it on the chair beside him, seemingly unable to take his eyes off of it. When we asked him "what's in the bag Rich?" he told us in hushed tones that it was something very important for something he had been asked to do, and that he had to look after it and make sure no-one bumped into it or else there would be an explosive outcome, clearly inferring that it contained some sort of explosive device and reinforcing the point by making a quiet 'bang' noise. After about an hour or so he got up to go to the toilet and asked us to keep a close eye on the briefcase in his absence. Literally the minute he'd gone through the door we booted it from one end of the pub to the other and back again. Luckily it must have been a dud as it failed to explode.

It was all quite tragic and I felt sorry for him - you might question why he wanted to hang around with boys half his age but I don't think there was any sort of sexual motive there, and he certainly never made any sort of advance on any of us. I just think he was a very lonely man with a boring job making industrial kettles who wanted to be someone special for a bit and misguidedly thought that making up this fantasy life would impress us.